Military TAF Remarks: AMD NOT SKED, Metwatch and Last Forecast

Military TAF remarks are not weather. They are statements about the forecasting service, and they answer a question a civil TAF never raises: is anybody still watching this airfield.

That makes them easy to skim past and expensive to misread. A remark here can tell you the forecast in front of you has been abandoned.

What separates these from METAR remarks

A METAR remark describes something measured. Sea-level pressure, the peak wind, when the rain began. It adds detail to an observation.

A military TAF remark usually describes staffing. Whether a forecaster is on duty, until what hour, and whether the message will be revised if conditions turn.

That difference matters because the second kind changes how much you should trust everything above it. A forecast nobody is watching is a forecast that cannot correct itself.

AMD NOT SKED, the one that reads backwards

AMD NOT SKED is the most common of these remarks and the most often misunderstood.

It expands to amendments not scheduled. The airfield does not have a forecaster rostered to amend this TAF. If the weather departs from the forecast, the forecast stays as it is.

The trap is the word AMD. On its own, in a TAF header, AMD means the message is an amendment. Here it means the opposite: no amendments will come. A quick reader can take AMD NOT SKED as confirmation the forecast is current and maintained, which is exactly wrong.

It usually appears at fields that are not open around the clock. Sometimes hours are attached, so amendments run during published hours and stop outside them.

Metwatch remarks

Metwatch is the term for a forecaster actively monitoring an airfield against its forecast. Two remarks tell you it has been reduced.

LIMITED METWATCH FROM 0200 TIL 1000 means reduced or no forecaster coverage through that window. Somebody may look, and may not.

AUTOMATED SENSOR METWATCH 0200 TIL 1000 is the stronger version. Sensors only, nobody on duty. The instruments keep reporting and no human is comparing them with the forecast.

Through either window the forecast can drift a long way from reality without anything being issued. Our parser also handles the misspellings that turn up in real traffic, such as SENOSR and SENSR, and flags them rather than quietly correcting them.

Last forecast wording

The third family tells you the forecast has an end, and that after it there is nothing.

LAST NO AMDS AFT 0200 means this is the final forecast for the airfield and it will not be amended after 0200. A next issuance time sometimes follows, as in NEXT 1100, telling you when service resumes.

That gives you a window to plan around. Before 0200 the forecast is live. After it, the message is a historical document that happens to describe the future.

For a diversion airfield this is worth checking early. An alternate whose forecast stops being watched at 0200 is a weaker alternate at 0400 than the words on the page suggest.

What to do with them

Treat these remarks as a confidence adjustment on everything above them.

If the forecast is watched and amendable, a quiet TAF is decent evidence of quiet weather. Somebody would have changed it otherwise.

If the forecast carries AMD NOT SKED or sits inside an automated metwatch window, a quiet TAF is evidence only of what one person expected hours ago. Weight the observations more heavily and check the area products.

None of this makes the forecast wrong. It removes the safety net that would normally catch it being wrong.

A quick way to use them

Read the end of the TAF first. It takes five seconds and it frames the rest.

Look for three things. Is there a stop time? Is there a gap with no one on watch? Does the field amend at all?

If none of the three are there, the forecast is live. Read it as you would any other. If one of them is there, note the hour it starts.

Then ask a simple question. Will you be flying after that hour? If you will, the TAF is a guess made long before you got there.

That is the whole drill. It does not take long and it changes what you do with the rest of the page.

Verdict on military TAF remarks

Read the remark block before you trust the forecast, not after. It is short and it tells you how much the rest is worth.

AMD NOT SKED means unwatched, not updated. Metwatch remarks give you the hours nobody is looking. Last-forecast wording gives you the moment the service stops. All three say the same thing in different words: from here, you are on your own with the observations.

Last updated August 29, 2026